The Noisy Little Monkey Blog

HTTP vs HTTPS for SEO?

There’s been a lot of talk since mid 2015 about moving to your website to an HTTPS (secure protocol) for better rankings. In mid 2016 is it any more important?

In and of itself, moving to HTTPS doesn’t seem to be hugely important to simply to get better rankings. But, if you’ve got the option and it won’t impact you much in terms of time or investment – make the move, it'll save you doing it later. Just make sure your website is NEVER running on BOTH versions. Unless your canonical tag is rocking it’s stuff, you’re showing duplicate content to Google and it hates that.

How to check you're not running both HTTP & HTTPS

Type: http://<yourdomain> into your browser and hit “enter” or “go”. Look carefully at the address bar. Is it STILL saying http:// at the beginning and not https://? OK. Now try the other version https://<yourdomain> - you should only ever see your website on one version of the protocol… It should either redirect to the other or error.